Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,775 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 33% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 64% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 6.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 59
Highest review score: 100 Mulholland Dr.
Lowest review score: 0 Jojo Rabbit
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,349 out of 7775
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7775
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7775
7775 movie reviews
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  1. The Crash Reel
    It compellingly captures a family wrestling mightily with the riddles and contradictions of a culture that promotes achievement at all costs with little thought as to what that actually means.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Exit Elena
    Nathan Silver's film is a quiet and affecting micro-budgeted drama, its condensed frame evoking the claustrophobic feeling of the household it examines.
  3. Broken
    It's the rare coming-of-age narrative that manages to respect the tricky ambiguities of shifting perceptions.
  4. Jug Face
    Chad Crawford Kinkle impressively imbues this supernatural world of backwoods mysticism with a plausible milieu while still staying committed to the film's own brewing insanity.
  5. A Single Shot
    Content to faithfully hew to convention, A Single Shot rarely surprises, but its portrait of foolishness and fallibility, and its atmosphere of inevitable doom, remain sturdy and captivating.
  6. Postales (Postcards)
    Throughout the film, writer-director Jash Hyde avoids Paul Haggis's patronizing white liberal attitude toward class warfare.
  7. After Tiller
    It gives a true sense of how the forces of a hypocritically religious country has burdened countless young women with a lifetime of misplaced guilt.
  8. Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
    It occasionally succumbs to the pitfalls of the mock-thriller kitsch it slyly dismantles, but it's made up for in a wry and experimental visual style that satirically paints a vibrant crime fantasia.
  9. Bad Milo!
    It's fair to say that a filmmaker is thinking outside of the box when he or she stages a scene in which an ambulatory hemorrhoid tears a guy's cock off with its teeth and swallows it.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sparrows Dance
    Writer-director Noah Buschel interestingly mirrors the monotony of his main character's routine in his claustrophobic aesthetic.
  11. Mademoiselle C
    It's to Carine Roitfeld's own credit and director Fabien Constant's funky and frenetic pacing that the doc feels neither like a corporate hagiography nor like mere fashionista masturbation material.
  12. Seconds
    A beautiful x-ray of middle-aged existential crisis, Seconds is arguably a second-tier John Frankenheimer funhouse of paranoia, but the same might be said of any film that isn’t The Manchurian Candidate.
  13. +1
    It ambitiously parodies and mourns the implications of the one coherent message that mass media manages to convey to all of its consumers in all its endlessly proliferating, ever-shifting permutations.
  14. Tokyo Waka: A City Poem
    Its discursiveness does have the intriguing effect of leaving behind a myriad of impressions about its subjects rather than settling on pat interpretations.
  15. The Last Time I Saw Macao
    The essayistic remembrances provide the filmmakers with a brilliant exit strategy when the noir business has nowhere to go but in circles.
  16. Night Moves
    Like Michael Cera's two recent films with Sebastian Silva, Night Moves reveals the dark core contained within an actor's nice-guy neuroticism.
  17. Abigail Harm
    Lee Isaac Chung's film exudes a wonderful sense of originality, a daring and organic playfulness rarely found in American indie cinema.
  18. Red Obsession
    Offers the ins and outs of the world of wine as an implicit metaphor for art appreciation, from both aesthetic and financial standpoints.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Informant
    It creates a useful distance between Brandon Darby and his stories that allow for us to assess them individually, reinforcing the film's suggestion that the truth is elusive.
  20. Begin Again
    It's a film that lives in the high and not in the comedown, even though its characters are often stalled and wallowing.
  21. Joe
    Director David Gordon Green finds a balance between symbolism and realism in his storytelling that allows the film to be many things at once.
  22. Moebius
    A kind of silent opera in which the actors' precise facial emoting and a muscular editing rhythm create a melodrama by turns horrific and hilarious.
  23. We Are the Best!
    Lukas Moodysson's film allows its trio of girls to express themselves through gender, certainly, but not undermine their desire to be heard as artists first.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Abuse of Weakness
    Breillat's scripting of Maud as fatally distant from her family, willfully independent, but more believably abandoned, is haunting.
  25. Shepard & Dark
    Treva Wurmfeld's documentary addresses, and acutely analyzes, the way friendship can bend, and occasionally snap, over time.
  26. Le Week-End
    Both keenly calculated and flowing with offbeat, naturalistic detail, Hanif Kureishi's jewel of a script reflects his sensibilities as a playwright.
  27. The Square
    A blistering portrait of rebellion against social discord, marginalization and oppression, and a call to arms for true democratic ideals of dignity, justice, and fairness.
  28. I Used to Be Darker
    The songs performed here function as the creative end point of emotional trauma, revealing pain gradually transfigured into art.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Dead Man and Being Happy
    At once familiar and enigmatic, Javier Rebollo's The Dead Man and Being Happy feels like a connect-the-dots film with a few lines artfully blurred.
  30. A River Changes Course
    A delicate documentary about a way of life that's slowly disappearing, yet gives way to nothing new.
  31. The Missing Picture
    Paramount to molding a narrative of war and totalitarianism, however, is the inventive aesthetic in which Panh frames his memoir: a hypnotic hybrid of bleak archival footage, thoughtful voiceover, tone-dictating music, and—most significantly—homemade clay-figurine dioramas.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Spinning Plates
    Spinning Plates may inadvertently be one of the year's best films about class differences in America.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Gloria
    With its compelling and original approach to its romance narrative, coupled with Paulina García's nuanced and intuitive performance, the film delicately balances an entire octave of emotions.
  34. Narco Cultura
    Director Shaul Schwarz, sans judgment, presents us with two men who epitomize how accepted and engrained narco culture has become in Mexico.
  35. Réquiem NN
    Filmmaker Juan Manuel Echavarría's hands-off approach hinders us from mocking the believers' naïveté.
  36. The New Black
    It does little to break free of the conventional talking-head documentary format, but thoughtful in how it prizes dialogue over acrimony and one-sided rhetoric.
  37. A Perfect Man
    In its elliptical presentation of its characters' lives, brings to mind the latter-day films of Philippe Garrel, but Kees Van Oostrum's genre experimentation aligns him with Paul Verhoeven.
  38. Chinese Puzzle
    Cédric Klapisch's film becomes an effervescent variation on the time-honored story of striking out for the American dream.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Golden Slumbers
    It puts value back on people who've historically been undervalued, both by the Khmer Rouge and, by lack of mention, cinema history at large.
  40. Maidentrip
    A coming-of-age journey of self-realization, made immensely more involving by virtue of being seen through its subject's first-person perspective.
  41. Paradise: Hope
    The third and final film in Ulrich Seidl's "Paradise" trilogy navigates a narrow space between tenderness and cruelty.
  42. Tim's Vermeer
    It chronicles the quest of a self-described "geek," and there are pleasurable frissons of discovery in the detective work.
  43. Jersey Boys
    However messy this overextended and oddly compelling work feels from moment to moment, the end result evokes the life of working artists without sentimentality or undue grandeur.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Body Bags
    That Body Bags largely succeeds, despite the perceptible lack of novel material, can be attributed to the strength of the assembled performances as well as the filmmakers’ attention to the dynamics of visual storytelling.
  45. Everyday
    While the film charts its protagonist's gradual progression toward a renewed sense of agency and freedom, it rarely indulges in lengthy or even linear narrative arcs.
  46. Spy
    It's the sustained, full-bodied mania of Melissa McCarthy's performance that anchors the film's many winning blind-alley gags.
  47. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
    It can't resist winking at how this franchise manages to defy the limits of both human endurance and its superstar's rickety public status.
  48. Paddington
    The film recalls its stylistic forbears at their best: flowing with whimsy, but never at the expense of the beating heart of its human (and animal) characters.
  49. Lenny Cooke
    While it verges on exploitation of the gentle giant at its core, it's also an effective bit of human drama, competently, and sometimes movingly, telling a story that deserves to be told.
  50. White Reindeer
    What's dark and weird about Zach Clark's film is also what's tangible, authentic, and wise about it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Last of the Unjust
    Claude Lanzmann's film doesn't so much strive to elucidate the Shoah as to draw us into its infinite moral complexities.
  52. The New Rijksmuseum
    It most potently strikes the tone of an elegy, pensively observing that beneath the bickering in museum boardrooms lies a massive treasure trove of art history that's being kept from the public's eye.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Night of the Comet
    While it would be unduly dismissive to write off Night of the Comet as a cult film merely by association, a good bit of its ancillary charm is obviously owing to its resonant casting choices: Reuniting Beltran and Woronov in the wake of Paul Bartel’s blistering black comedy Eating Raoul adds extra spice to the one longish scene they share.
  54. Ernest & Célestine
    It's in the way the film refuses to characterize its central friendship solely on the grounds of common isolation that becomes its most endearing quality.
  55. Lucy
    Vulgar auteurist Luc Besson finally commits wholeheartedly to his decades-long preoccupation with waifish young women discovering their inner Shiva, spinning the concept out to its most delirious possible extremes.
  56. Veronica Mars
    For all its references to the show's history, the film never panders. It's an evolution of the core concept as opposed to a nostalgia-tinged reproduction, and is all the better for it.
  57. Mary Poppins
    The “Whistle While You Work” residue of domestic slavery that colors “A Spoonful of Sugar” aside, Mary Poppins is basically Long Day’s Journey Into Matriarchy (cathartic for some, terrifying for others).
  58. Liv & Ingmar
    The documentary not only humanizes Ingmar Bergman as the absent lover-cum-father of everyday life, but works as a priceless oral history of cinema.
  59. Journey to the West
    Stephen Chow's distinctive vision is evident in the seemingly boundless imagination of his scenarios, and in the film's sincere spiritual concerns and generosity toward misfits and outsiders.
  60. In Bloom
    The foreclosure of possibilities provided by the use of the long take assists in the indictment of chauvinism and patriarchal brutality that underpin, directly and indirectly, many moments in the film.
  61. The Rocket
    The particulars of Laos's historical conflicts are sometimes only obliquely confronted, but the torrid past of covered-up wars palpably echoes through the scarred yet majestic landscapes.
  62. Visitors
    Godfrey Reggio's symphony of pristine 4K images doesn't add up to one grand epiphany, but an intermittent cluster of small ones.
  63. Jodorowsky's Dune
    This is a fanboy movie, one more engaged with the excitement of possibility than that of reality, and whatever the noxious connotations of that form of film appreciation, this particular project does a pretty fantastic job of stirring up enthusiasm.
  64. Boyhood
    Richard Linklater's film is an experiment in time, and one that's attentive to the audience's sense of empathy.
  65. 24 Exposures
    Throughout, Joe Swanberg connects Generation Y's fetish for past pop-cultural kitsch to its attending sexual insecurities.
  66. G.B.F.
    The film, lensed in appealing candy-striped colors, has so much fun exploding stereotypes and radiates with such infectious comic gusto and genuine good nature, that it would be almost churlish to resist its charms.
  67. Carol
    The film dares its viewers to consider that--for a couple of hours, at least--even when a thing seems too good to be true, it might not be.
  68. Knight of Cups
    It has the uncanny quality of an out-of-body experience, not a torn-from-the-heart confessional.
  69. Manglehorn
    David Gordon Green stages even fleeting tonal palate cleansers with a self-consciousness that parallels Al Pacino's acting.
  70. A Most Wanted Man
    Anton Corbijn constructs a stifling world of shadowy surveillance and intersecting national interests, building on John Le Carré's sense of moral and emotional exhaustion.
  71. She's Funny That Way
    Familiar as its art/life paralleling may be, it's all fueled by a filmmaker with an intimate relationship to his subject matter.
  72. Two Days, One Night
    The Dardennes believe in human value and social order being rooted in a sense of solidarity, a staggering consciousness of community that brims with a sensitivity to place, movement, and emotion.
  73. When I Saw You
    Like Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows, Tarek has a way of using defiance and sarcasm to make himself seem smarter than any ostensible authority figure.
  74. They Came Together
    What results is chaotic but ultimately focused, bound by an intense devotion to disassembling genre and narrative standards.
  75. Ping Pong Summer
    A heartfelt retro flashback littered with pop-culture iconography and much slang, it focuses on the importance of friendship and loyalty rather than social standing.
  76. The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
    The film is far from a technical matter, fiercely promoting Swartz's legacy and challenging us with the same questions its central subject was compelled to ask.
  77. The Skeleton Twins
    Craig Johnson's film is ultimately most interested in what its jokes are implying or obscuring about the jokesters themselves.
  78. Eden
    Every substrata of music geekdom deserves a period piece as intimate as Eden, Mia Hansen-Løve's swan song for the golden era of French house music.
  79. Dinosaur 13
    To some extent, the use of a wide aspect ratio and the doc's emphatic score takes its cues from paleontologist Pete Larson's passion.
  80. Frank
    The film boldly raises the unanswerable question of whether it's better for an artist to safely isolate his work or tweak it a bit so as to share it with the world.
  81. Finding Fela!
    Alex Gibney uses archival and Broadway footage so seamlessly that telling the difference between reality and recreation becomes not only difficult, but one of the film's central metaphors.
  82. The Pretty One
    The film is a quiet, tender triumph that leaves you feeling as if you've been embraced without you feeling had.
  83. The Hateful Eight
    The premise of the film is simple, but it's a simplicity that can only attract complications, as simple plans are apt to do, in an atmosphere of foreboding and the macabre.
  84. Listen Up Philip
    By putting so much weight on his characters' speech, Alex Ross Perry's is an approach with honestly few contemporaries in American independent film.
  85. The Guest
    David's perversity as a character is mostly disarming for how it illuminates the sadness with which a foe can so readily be confused for a savior.
  86. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
    It settles firmly into the perspective of a lost soul who finds solace in the swaddling security of fantasy.
  87. Papirosen
    Gastón Solnicki's mapping out of his family's narrative from within never feels exploitative or self-absorbed.
  88. 7 Boxes
    The film is ripe with powerful subtext, specifically how greed, celebrity, and technology help to form a misguided sense of opportunity that keeps the working class downtrodden.
  89. The Lunchbox
    The patience in mercurially presenting the characters' backstories and desires is matched by the film's genuine curiosity about the healing power of sharing stories.
  90. Cat People
    Unjustifiably compared to the original film upon its release, Schrader’s Cat People is more of an erotic reinvention of the Bodeen story. Though Schrader keeps the Fangoria crowd at bay with a series of grisly tableaus, he remains less concerned with the body-horrific than he does with the rituals of sex—mandatory and otherwise.
  91. 12 O'Clock Boys
    It constantly divides itself between fulfilling the conventions of the informational talking-heads documentary and aiming for a more poetically impressionistic quality.
  92. Charlie Victor Romeo
    The film's tension doesn't come from the why or how, but more from the idea that one becomes so settled into habit that seemingly nothing is capable of interfering.
  93. Obvious Child
    Whatever your foreknowledge of low-budget Brooklyn dramedies, it's impossible that Gillian Robespierre's film won't lob you at least a few curveballs.
  94. Love Is in the Air
    The film is knowingly sarcastic in its self-awareness without falling back on the gawky meta-squealing of its American rom-com counterparts.
  95. Pitch Perfect 2
    Even stronger than its predecessor, which didn't quite go as far in terms of representing these young women in a wider context.
  96. The Rover
    Robert Pattinson's stare is almost thousand-yard enough to make the film's sense of tragedy feel downright Greek.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Vic + Flo Saw a Bear
    The film presents its tonal switch-ups and narrative swerves with a deadpan belligerence by turns stimulating, calculated, and poignant.
  98. '71
    It distinguishes itself from Pual Greengrass's films by virtue of its close attention to political and moral ambiguities.
  99. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    Chiemi Karasawa's documentary is remarkable for its candor, but it's a brutal honesty that Elaine Stritch herself gladly offers.
  100. The Island of St. Matthews
    It gives us a series of images that, free from definitive context, form a new reality of their own, a small composite portrait of previously untold stories.
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